Allow me to introduce myself.    Trained as a textile artist and fashion designer, professionally I am known as an executive in the world of retail.   Retail is not particularly known for its dedication to Slow, but rather is a world which thrives on and requires speed to market.  In my field it is all about knowing your customers and responding – quickly – to their needs.  To counterbalance  this addiction to speed, I have retained my connection to my training as an artist and have become a knitter – a serial knitter, in fact – throughout the past decade.

Thought by some to be the domain of grannies, knitting allows me to start something from the ground up, focus on the practice and the journey .   It is amazing to start with balls of yarn and Slowly, Slowly, Slowly create something entirely different.  You can carry that creation with you to multiple experiences, keeping the slow rhythm of knitting a constant during meetings, long plane rides, boring waits.  Dr. Perri Klass, in her book Two Sweaters For My Father: Writing About Knitting knitted her way through medical school, much to the chagrin of her mostly male classmates.  She claimed it kept her alert throughout lectures, a not-to-be-scoffed at accomplishment for sleep deprived residents.  It also kept her balanced and focused on the lectures.

With knitting, if you make a mistake, unlike in the rest of life, you get to rip it out and have a makeover.  The steady movement of your hands and need for counting stitches and rows provides a soothing counterbalance to chaos around and seems to allow true clarity of thinking.  Instead of the mind wandering, the mind seems to focus while knitting.  Some think we are not listening when we knit;  I have been reprimanded for knitting while attending strategic planning conferences.  Silly non-knitters.  If they only knew.
This is my introductory post on the concept and practice of Slow Design.  The posts will focus on artists who, whether they have named it as such, engage in Slow Design.  Those who work in the media formerly known as craft exemplify Slow Design, with their dedication to the connection between the mind and the hand.  Stitchers, ceramicists, glassblowers, furniture makers all practice the Art of Slow.  As I learn from them, I shall pass it along.

You know something is seriously awry when even the Tory leader claims we should be focusing on GWB as well as GDP. General Well-Being is a catch-all phrase, but in our long-hours culture it can only mean one thing: striking a better work-life balance. As Paul Lafargue — Karl Marx’s son-in-law — pointed out, God seems to have sussed it from the word go: “after six days of work, he rests for all eternity” (The Right to be Lazy, 1883). Although scripture is notoriously open to interpretation, prelapsarian Eden is patently presented as a work-free environment. It is only after the Fall — and, crucially, as a result of it — that men were condemned to earn their dough: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (Genesis 3:19). Women, for their pains, would bring forth children “in sorrow”. The word ‘travail’ — French for ‘work’ — also happens to refer to labour pains: it derives from the Latin tripalium which, fittingly enough, was an instrument of torture. As for ‘labour’ itself, it comes from labor meaning ‘trouble’. No wonder work is a four-letter word (to quote the 1968 Cilla Black number famously covered by the Smiths).

In ancient Greece, work was restricted to slaves — a set-up which provided a blueprint for the West until the Industrial Revolution. By the early nineteenth century, however, “the voice of busy common-sense” — as Keats dubbed it — had become deafening (”Ode on Indolence,” 1819). Nietzsche observed how people were beginning to feel guilty of “prolonged reflection”: “Well, formerly, it was the other way around: it was work that was afflicted with the bad conscience. A person of good family used to conceal the fact that he was working if need compelled him to work. Slaves used to work, oppressed by the feeling that they were doing something contemptible” (The Gay Science, 1882). “It is to do nothing that the elect exist,” Oscar Wilde reaffirmed defiantly in the face of a triumphant work ethic. Contemplation, he lamented, had come to be regarded as “the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty” rather than “the proper occupation of man”. It is this gradual erosion of the contemplative life — “the life that has for its aim not doing but being” — which writers and dreamers have always tried to resist (”The Critic as Artist,” 1891). Robert Louis Stevenson — who poured scorn on those “who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation” — argued that idleness “does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formulations of the ruling class” (”An Apology for Idlers,” 1881). In How to be Idle (2004), Tom Hodgkinson — co-founder of The Idler magazine (1993) — reminds us that “living is an art, not something that you fit in around your job”.

Pockets of collective anti-work resistance appeared at regular intervals throughout the 20th century, from the drop-out beatniks to the unemployed punks. The Sex Pistols’ brazen “I’m a Lazy Sod” contained the classic line: “I don’t work, I just speed; that’s all I need”. Bow Wow Wow’s second single — “W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah No! No! My Daddy Don’t)” — turned the tables on Thatcherite austerity by celebrating the rise of the idle poor. Many like Morrissey went looking for a job and then found a job and heaven knows were miserable now. 1991 saw the release of Slackers as well as the publication of Generation X whose protagonists relocate to the Californian desert after opting out of the rat race. Douglas Coupland’s downshifting classic was subtitled “Tales for an Accelerated Culture,” mirroring the parallel rise of the Slow movement anticipated by Bertrand Russell (”In Praise of Idleness,” 1932) and chronicled by Carl Honoré (In Praise of Slow: Challenging the Cult of Speed, 2004).

“Our epoch has been called the century of work,” Lafargue wrote, back in the 1880s, “It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.” “Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of,” D. H. Lawrence echoed in the 1920s (”A Sane Revolution”). Unsurprisingly, Dr. Frank Lipman’s current diagnosis is that we are all completely knackered (Spent? End Exhaustion & Feel Great Again, 2009). So what are we to do? One option is to follow the advice of New Rich guru Timothy Ferriss whose best-selling The 4-Hour Work Week (2007) is designed to teach you how to let money make itself by outsourcing your business. Alternatively, we could turn to Melville’s Bartleby who, when asked to do anything, answers: “I would prefer not to” (Bartleby, the Scrivener, 1853). We could also take our cue from Jerome K. Jerome — the forefather of Phone In Sick Day — and get our kicks from the illicit thrill of skiving: “There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do” (”On Being Idle,” 1889). Following Thierry Paquot (The Art of the Siesta, 1998), Hodgkinson prescribes hitting the snooze button where it hurts: “Edison promoted the idea of ‘more work, less sleep’. The idler’s creed is ‘less work, more sleep’”.

One man who devoted his life and, er, work (8 slim volumes in 65 years) to sleep was Egyptian émigré Albert Cossery. His was a militant form of idleness which he saw as the only way to fully enjoy “the Edenic simplicity of the world”. In an early short story, the inhabitants of an impoverished neighbourhood are prepared to kill off those who interrupt their sacred slumber before noon; in another, an Oblomov-style character refuses to leave his bed for a whole year. Cossery was convinced that those who rejected (or were deprived of) material wealth gained access to a heightened state of consciousness hence the constant association between destitution and nobility. In 1945, he checked in to a poky hotel — on the very same Parisian street where the iconic “Ne travaillez jamais” (”Never work”) graffito would soon appear — and remained there, doing precious little, until he passed away last year. Cossery chose to get a life instead of a job. Perhaps more of us should do the same — the world might be a better place.

This first appeared in the summer 2009 edition of Flux Magazine (issue 69).

Two words that seem at odds at first, but what I am interested in writing about is neither tango or sabbaticals, but the pleasure of returning to something you know well with fresh eyes after taking time off. This notion goes against the prevailing myth of progress, in which one practices and practices and gets better and better. Sometimes one has to stop or go backwards to move forwards. That is true for me with tango.

Let me tell you a little about my history with tango. I started with one tango class which lasted for six weeks. After the class was over, I went to my first tango dance. I sat there in my short black dress and high-heeled shoes and watched the accomplished dancers tracing fancy arabesques on the floor, and realized I knew nothing. When a man approached and asked me to dance, I said no and fled. Tango was over for me.

But about a year later, I went to a Dance Week at Stanford during the summer and signed up for two tango classes. One was a beginning class taught by two San Francisco teachers who had the students switch roles frequently. It was illuminating to see tango from both sides. But it was the Intermediate class that hooked me forever. The teacher was from Argentina. He taught only to the men, explaining the moves he wanted them to make, and he did not insure that students rotated to new partners, so you had to grab a partner at the start of class and hold on tight or you would be lost (there’s almost always an extra woman or two at dance classes). And holding on tight was the point. He was teaching the milonguero style of tango, which is also called close embrace. His best instruction for the women was simple: close your eyes and try not to think. What is left? Music and two bodies moving together. It’s a state of both hyper awareness and total surrender. So that’s what I did throughout those summer afternoons, emerging from each class as if in a dream.

Back in Seattle, I vowed to become good at tango. I took classes. I attended dances. Tango has a way of becoming an addiction and most tango dancers in Seattle (which is one of the top tango cities in America) dance three to four nights a week. So did I. But after about five years, I found I was not getting any better. Worse yet, I stopped enjoying the dance. The flame had died for me. I stopped going to dances and blamed this on being “too busy.”

Then this summer time opened up for me again, as if often does in summer and I decided to take a tango class. I wanted to study with a young man, Jaimes Friedgen, who is a beautiful tango dancer. The last time I looked at his web site, he was offering only five classes. Now, two years later, he has developed a sophisticated curriculum with a sequence of fifteen classes, which should be taken in order. He recommended starting at the beginning, even for dancers with some experience. So I signed up for the beginning class, secretly hoping Jaimes would recognize my ability and suggest that I move on to a more advanced class.

Now I wouldn’t move if he asked me to. I love the freedom of having no expectations. No one expects me to be any good so the pressure is off. For the first three classes, we will be moving in unison with our partners, without using our arms, but relying on visual cues and physical momentum. While difficult, this will allow us to be more flexible later. I realized that this has been my problem since I first learned tango. I hold all my tension in my arms and shoulders so when I get anxious my grip becomes quite rigid. No wonder I wasn’t able to loosen up enough to follow my partners through some of the more intricate steps they wanted to lead. I come away from every new tango lesson glowing with pleasure. The dance is alive for me once more.

And I can look forward to a long life in tango. It is one of those dances that generously welcomes young and old and everyone in between. In an era where dancers on TV shows learn routines in one week and the audience perceives this progress in a fast five minute segment, tango is truly a dance of Slow Time. It would probably take about five years to be considered an intermediate level tango dancer (assuming you dance three nights a week) and twenty years to be an advanced dancer. I have the time.

The Slow Cities movement has been growing, but seems to have had a difficult time crossing the Atlantic Ocean. During my original research on the Slow Cities movement, I interviewed many people in North America who felt that the movement could never work here. They cited the North American lack of history and area-specific roots, lack of localized culture, and love of independence as some of the reasons why Slow Cities would never be successful on this side of the ocean. These people were largely politicians, city planners and other officials. However, when I explained the Slow Cities movement to many of my own friends and others who would be considered “residents” and not “officials” of urban areas, they were intrigued. They asked me questions like: “How can we make our city a Slow City?” and “I want to live in a Slow City. Why isn’t my city like that?”  There seems to be a growing grassroots demand for such cities and spaces — a demand which is increasing the more people learn about the slow movement and the possibilities of Slow Cities. I, for one, felt convinced that a Slow City could indeed exist in North America.

And now I may not be alone. It seems that the Slow Cities movement will be starting in British Columbia, the Canadian province bordering the Pacific Ocean. Specifically, it is Cowichan Bay, B.C., which is planning to be the first Slow City in Canada, and also in North America. I applaud Cowichan Bay for taking the initiative and for not listening to the naysayers (of which there are many).

The Slow Cities movement has much to teach North America. While Slow Food has taken root here already, many people continue to feel that the urban areas should be progressive and not “stuck in the past” (as many interpret Slow Cities to be). Many North American cities choose quantity over quality. They do not understand that quality can coexist with progress, and that quality of life can indeed be stronger if the slow movement philosophies were considered and incorporated.

My hope is that Cowichan Bay will emerge as a model. Not every location will choose to be a Slow City, but at least some of the philosophy could be adopted by more and more North American places. Cities, towns and neighbourhoods could benefit by understanding the positive effects of living more slowly.

No point in adding yet another platitude to the ocean of comments on Google’s announcement of Chrome OS. Guess we saw it coming. And it was hardly rocket science, I might add.

It is however worrying that Google envisions an operating system that will fire up a laptop in just a few seconds. I mean, after all these years of getting used to operating systems that take more and more time to start up, I sort of got fond of the idea of being delayed. Admitted, it’s the IT version of the Stockholm Syndrome, but I actually cherished these precious moments of being forced to do nothing. Whether Windows, OS X, or Ubuntu: while loading their endless series of kernel software modules and drivers, they all brought me valuable opportunities to meditate or to contemplate the day to come. I would watch that hourglass for many minutes and time after time it would remind me of the relativity of technology and the craziness of rush and speed. Or I would just thoroughly enjoy a strong espresso. Or I would do nothing. All justified by our commonly shared acceptance of operating systems that are so complex that they take forever to come to live.

Now Google breaks this equilibrium with Crome OS, with the promise that booting it will be a matter of seconds. It will set a trend and we should hate them for it. Or at least, we should think twice before clicking on one of these placed ads. That will teach them.

Goodbye Quality Time. I will miss you dearly.

14-7-2009 update: more discussion on ZDnet